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Is contemporary art really art or something else entirely, and,
if it is art, then what does that say about art's place in the
world? These are some of the most frequent questions and criticisms
raised against contemporary art. Such claims testify not only to
the often tense relationship between the general audience and
contemporary artistic practice, but they also emphasise that
contemporary art is once again an 'ivory tower', a hermetic and
esoteric enclave that persists despite the history of the twentieth
century and the apparent shift from modernism to postmodernism.
This persistence of a form of the avant-garde, albeit a debated and
controversial one, is not just a theoretical issue within critical
discourse but also an important subject matter for contemporary
artworks themselves.

It might appear unnecessary, or even incorrect, to raise these
questions in our current cultural era. After all, we have seen the
transformation of the 'art-piece' into an art 'work' (Roland
Barthes), its 'space' changed into a 'site' (Michel Foucault) that
is in turn just another fragment of the 'expanded field' (Rosalind
Krauss) of our postmodern global culture. Yet, in spite of art
being swept up in the multi-media and inter-disciplinary waves of
recent discourse, and even because many contemporary artworks look
so similar to other cultural products, at some point it is crucial
to try to discriminate the artistic medium from the rest of
medialand and to find out what still gives art its raison
d'être.

If we don't simply rehearse the Marxist position that furiously
accuses art of being the product of cynical, commercial, bourgeois,
capitalist and power interests, then we will discover that the most
interesting and crucial artworks encode

Footnotes

On the figures of witnessing and testimony, in the context of
Israeli art and culture, see Sarit Shapira, Not to be looked at
(Invisible site in Israel today) (exh. cat.), Jerusalem: The Israel
Museum, 2000↑

The term 'site' is used here in the Foucauldian manner that
defines it as a machine determined only by the temporary
interrelation and interaction of its participants. See Michel
Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces' in Diacritics, 1986↑

Rosalind Krauss, 'The Grid', in The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986,
pp.9-22↑

In one of Tzaig's recent performances at Fondation Cartier,
Paris the polyphonic voice was taken back into the theatrical
space. Two performers were put in a theatrical balcony, each of
them commenting on diemoves of one ball while The Universal Square
was projected on a large screen.↑

On certain occasions, such as his performance in Saint-Nazaire,
France in 1996, Tzaig introduced two balls into a game of one team.
In other cases, such as in Derby, 1996 performed in Lod, Israel, he
invited two referees to supervise two teams playing with two
balls.↑

The difference between idealisation and sublimation is discussed
in Sigmund Freud, 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', in Andrew
Morrison (ed.), Essential Papers on Narcissism, New York: New York
University Press, 1986, pp.34-39↑

Circular and cyclic images as representations of mythical,
ex-historical and unworldly time were broadly discussed in Mircea
Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991↑

A phonetic resemblance, similar to the one between Jericho and
yareach (moon) was already practiced by Uri Tzaig some years ago in
his video piece Desert (1996). The two-ball basketball game on the
monitor was accompanied by a voice-over that poetically discussed
the resemblance and possible co-relations between the Hebrew word
for desert, 'midbar' and the Hebrew term for a thing (or what is
discussed by Heiddeger as 'das Ding', that which anticipates the
object), 'davar'.↑

The parallel between a Narcissistic figure (as the term is used
in psychoanalytic discourse) and the textural structures of
contemporary reproductions and duplications is raised in Rosalind
Krauss, 'Notes on the Index: Part 1, Part 2' in The Originality of
the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, op. cit., pp.199-215↑

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